Walk while you work? Many employees join healthful trend

5:32 p.m. EST, February 14, 2012|By Greg Dawson, Orlando Sentinel

Samantha O'Lenick keeps a pair of tennis shoes stowed under the desk in her office — for company meetings. A dozen times a week, O'Lenick kicks off her heels, laces up her tennies, gathers her staff and hits the streets.

Since January, O'Lenick , director of public relations at Florida Hospital in Orlando, has held all her staff meetings on the move in fresh air. When O'Lenick informed her staff that all future meetings would convene on the sidewalk instead of a conference room, "they said, 'You've got to kidding.' I told them I was serious. People really love it now."

O'Lenick is getting good mileage from her mobile meetings — about 36 on the highway per week in miles walked, and an untold number in greater staff camaraderie and brisker meetings.

"You get to know people so much better out in the elements than sitting across from them at a table," she said.

Walking meetings, and their stationary cousin standing meetings, are among the innovative wrinkles slowly transforming the American workplace. Credit a host of catalysts, including a growing aversion to the rigid "Mad Men" corporate culture, and company wellness initiatives that improve worker health and productivity while lowering health-care costs.

FruitGuys is a California company whose onlybusiness is shipping fresh fruit to thousands of companies nationwide, which offer it free to employees as an alternative to break-room staples such as cookies, doughnuts and vending-machine snacks that do more to raise blood sugar and pressure than productivity.

Nutritional snacks and moving meetings help keep workers fit, but some workplace innovations aren't just about the health benefits.

At Row Sham Bow, a developer of social-network games in downtown Orlando with two dozen employees, the traditional table meeting is not an option for a good reason: There are no conference tables.

"Every evening, people stand up in a circle and talk for a minute about what they did that day," said office manager Soledad Hasan. "I come from a law firm which is very stringent. This is completely opposite. This is a trusting, no-ego, team-playing atmosphere."

Anissa Rogers, 40, doesn't have to worry about being a team player. She works from her Lake Mary home as a recruiter for pharmaceutical companies, spending most of the day on the computer. But she's walking the whole time and facing a window on the world.

"It's as if I'm at the park taking a nice stroll," she said.

The simulated bliss is achieved through use of a TrekDesk, a portable, kidney-shaped surface that fits over a treadmill, allowing the user to conduct business without breaking stride. A competitive bodybuilder, Rogers calculates she burns 126 calories an hour. She said being upright all day has improved her posture. Rogers has no regrets about burning through $400 for the TrekDesk. "Honestly, I feel energized."

At Florida Hospital, O'Lenick helped launch the Healthy 100 program to encourage community wellness. That's when she decided her office should walk the walk, not just talk the talk. She told vendors to stop bringing cookies, cupcakes and chocolates, and stocked the office fridge with fruit and hummus. The next steps, literally, were out the door as O'Lenick decided to take her meetings on the road.

On a cool, cloudy Friday morning ideal for walking, O'Lenick and three members of her staff met on the sidewalk across from Florida Hospital on North Orange Avenue. Olenick and Laura Grubbs were in tennies, Natalia Cabrero in knee-high boots, and Marie Ioime in low heels — a departure from her usual tennis shoes.

The group headed out on what would be a 2.8-mile circle: south on Orange, east on Princeton Street through Loch Haven Park to Mills Avenue, north past Lake Estelle — "Can you smell the fish out there?" O'Lenick said, pointing to birds flocking on the surface — and then west again on Orange for the homestretch on shaded sidewalks past Orwin Manor.

O'Lenick got through her agenda with time to spare. Another successful walking meeting — thoughit flirted with disaster.

As the group was crossing a street near the Science Center, one of Ioime's heels caught a divot in the pavement, and she went flying. Luckily, she landed well and was unhurt. Ioime brushed herself off, straightened her clothes, and the meeting continued. She remains a fan of the mobile confab. Her only complaint?